> A diatribe on what does belong on the root filesystem is a topic for
> another discussion.
But where should we hold it? :-) I recently was trying to run SunOS
4.1.3_u1 diskless with a read-only root (the point being to share the
root among all the disklesses), and it ain't pretty. (Creative
symlinking out of /etc helps a lot, but still leaves at least rpc.statd
and ldconfig, and probably umount...and figuring out how to mount
/var.)
NetBSD is a lot better; I ran NetBSD/sparc diskless with a read-only
root briefly, without much trouble.
> Then SunOS came out and reorganized the filesystem hierarchy (replete
> with /var) and reorganized cron such that /usr/lib/crontab went away
> and was replaced with /var/spool/cron/crontabs/$USER.
I was under the impression this was some preexisting layout, probably
taken from SysV. In any case, my major gripe with Sun's setup is that
if $EDITOR exits with a nonzero exit code, crontab -e throws away the
edited copy - but doesn't say so. I thus took to replacing
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/mouse by hand (and restarting cron if I cared
about quick response to the changes), which was less than ideal. My
$EDITOR was exiting with a random status code and I never noticed,
until finally NetBSD's crontab(1) was nice enough to tell me so.
der Mouse
mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu